This is a little project that started out as simply a little internal exercise for me to learn GameMaker Studio. I figured it would also count as my One Game a Month entry. When the whole Candy / Saga trademark thing hit, I figured I’d re-theme it and submit it for the CandyJam as well. Now, if I had more time (and skill), I wanted to have the background change gradually from a serene green landscape with candy forests on the horizon to a blasted wasteland. But… for a throw-away game, it was already getting to take up too much time. 🙂

As an exercise to learn GameMaker Studio, it succeeded quite well. While I am sure I don’t have a clue as to the more interesting details of bigger projects, I think I have the basics down. At some point in the near future, I may post little bits of my code from this game, but there are far better tutorials out there to learn how to use GameMaker.

As a parody / commentary … well, I had fun with it. Every time you lose (and it’s an arcade-style game where you will always, eventually, lose), the lawyers send a Cease & Desist for some reason or another, causing the game to change it’s title or instructions to something (temporarily) non-objectionable. Eventually, half the words in the game have been replaced with generic words or [REDACTED]. I had a lot of fun with that part. That took almost as much time to develop as the actual arcade game, if you don’t include the time I spent making the sprites. The sprites were a lot of fun. The lawyers COULD just be pointing in the air, for all you know… but I think most people will see it the way I see it.

The best version of the game is a Windows download, which you can obtain from itch.io (which hosts the Candy Jam… and which incidentally looks like it might be an interesting cheap-and-dirty alternative to Kongregate which includes downloadable games…). This is a single executable, no installer… just download and run. Since the file is unlikely to see much circulation, virus scanners will probably whine that they’ve never heard of it before, which makes it scawy or something.

You can also play the HTML 5 version, but it seems like this version has some broken sound effects. I guess Game Maker’s exporter isn’t 100% awesome yet. However, it’s cool that it could build both an executable for Windows and as a web-game. I guess if you are running on a non-windows, this will be the way to go:

(Like I said, I planned this to be a purely personal exercise originally. For a tiny, limited, free release I don’t feel too bad. I wanted to make a joke about that in the game itself, actually, but didn’t get around to it…)